GLAM Cooperation with Aeronautical Museum - Belgrade; WLM first time in Serbia

GLAM Cooperation with Aeronautical Museum - Belgrade

Aeronautical Museum-Belgrade

Aeronautical Museum in Belgrade and Wikimedia Serbia have signed on August 24th a Memorandum of cooperation concerning project of installing QR-codes in this institution which will help Aeronautical Museum in providing accessibility of information in Museum. Using Wikipedia and QRpedia's QR-codes, Museum visitors will be able to get informed about exhibits in several dozens of languages.

Installing QR codes is part of Wikimedia Serbia project Open Wiki GLAM of Serbia, started at the beginning of 2012. with goal of fostering a two-way cooperation between Wikimedia Serbia and GLAM institutions in creating and improving availability of cultural and historical heritage of Serbia on Internet.

By installing QR-codes, Aeronautical Museum in Belgrade will become the first institution in Serbia and the first museum on Balkans to use QRpedia QR-codes. Aeronautical museum will thus join numerous institutions around the world that cooperate with Wikimedia, some of which are Germany Federal Archive, British Museum, British Library, Art Museum Indianapolis, National Library of France, and many other.

"We are very pleased to start a cooperation with Wikimedia Serbia. Aeronautical Museum is one of the museums in Belgrade that will be implementing and using new technology. Installing QR-codes will be a big step towards the better communication with visitors, especially from abroad. Visitors will be able to use one very modern tool to get much detailed story about exhibits from our museum", said Museum custos, Petar Nedeljković.

Belgrade Aviation Museum is founded in 1957, and since 1989 it is on current location. Until 2012 Museum had one million visitors. BAM is in top 5 European aeronautical museums, and in top 10 in the world. Shape of building is very noticeable and it is one of city symbols. The biggest treasure of museum is collection of airplanes, that shows history between 1909 and 1999.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 - Serbia

Wiki Loves Monuments is a public photo contest around cultural and historical monuments, which is organized in a federative fashion, so the details on a national level might differ from country to country. The basic concept of uploading images of monumental objects under a free license for usage on Wikipedia resulted in around 168.000 photos submitted in 2011, with contestants from 18 participating countries. This year that number has almost doubled, giving a total number of 35 countries worldwide, with Serbia taking part in this project for the first time.

First steps have been made by sorting the official lists of monumental objects in Serbia, given to public usage by the Institute for Monument Preservation of Serbia. Currently, these lists contain 2409 monumental objects, which are separated into four subcategories: cultural and historical monuments (2110), places of great importance (71), cultural and historical sites (72) and archeological sites (156). Addresses and coordinates, as well as other missing data that could be found through other sources, were added manually and the lists were uploaded to Wikipedia as tables with templates. Having unified templates as the other participating countries helped harvesting the data from the tables, so it could be put in one common database.

Most of the monumental objects, as well as their photographs, were then linked to the corresponding articles and media on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Our local WLM website wlm.wikimedia.rs was designed and put online in the middle of August, and it now contains all the relevant information for participants from Serbia. It has a section in English as well, for all the foreigners who would like to take part in the competition by taking photographs of Serbian monumental objects. We have also started promoting the project on Facebook daily by sharing information about the contest as well as last year winner photos.

So far, we have made a multimedia presentation which is to be run during the month of September on tv-screens in public transport in Belgrade. It is supported by Masel Group, the leading company in Serbia when it comes to bus advertising. One of our sponsors is “National Geographic Serbia” which will take part in funding the 3rd prize – a one-year subscription to the “National Geographic Serbia” magazine. We are still waiting for sponsorship approvals from other major companies working with photo equipment and computer hardware.